


Buzzards

by stubbornbones



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 07:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7925764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stubbornbones/pseuds/stubbornbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A speculation on the origin of the Buzzards</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buzzards

**Author's Note:**

> I was greatly intrigued by the presence of the Russians in the middle of a post-apocalyptic Australian desert, so this happened.

The conscription letter comes as no great surprise. After all, cries of war have been hurtling across the globe for years now; it’s really more surprising that it took this long. You’ve trained for this. You’re prepared to fight for your nation, damaged as it is. But… Australia? What war has ever been fought on that chunk of desert in a far-off southern ocean?

You go, because you have no choice. You sit in an armored convoy vehicle next to half a dozen other soldiers, clutching your rifles in slick palms, each pretending they aren’t afraid. Your motherland is covered in blankets of white, but the land here is baked under a sun so merciless even the word “winter” melts away under its rays. Every inch of you is sweat-sticky under your uniform, even places you didn’t think could sweat, but it’s better than being burned nuclear red by this hellish excuse for summer.

You try to navigate by street signs written in an alphabet that you studied for years but is still so foreign. Your second night on enemy territory, a wild-eyed woman charges you with a knife, all disarrayed clothing and screeching voice, accusing you of spreading a political regime long dead. A bullet leaps from your rifle and opens her skull like a bloody present. In the following months, you shoot down hardened warriors who take your presence as a personal offense, dead-eyed young men and women who tout patriotic duty with no fire to back it up, boys with fear etched in every line of their face. You lie in your barracks at night and try not to see them and wait for the call home.

A new roar joins the war, a roar once intended for twentieth-century America, a roar that echoes with a million Japanese whispers: _“You see now how we have suffered.”_ Comrades return from the front with bald patches and bloody mouths. Tumors grow on bodies like bunches of grapes. Static slowly consumes the voices on the radio, but not before a final message is sent: there is not enough oil for the war ships and airplanes. You are on your own.

Invisible death saturates the air. The natives can smell defeat on you like a disease. There is only one option: retreat, further and further into the red and orange oven of the desert. Soon, everyone is fighting for land, for resources. You are soldiers; you stake your own claim. You conserve, you adapt. The armored plating on your vehicles is no longer sufficient protection against the angry charges of other gangs; you strip down the shells of vehicles that no longer work and cover your cars in spikes like porcupines. You fight for land; you fight for resources; you fight for your lives; you fight, you fight, you fight. After all, it’s what you were sent here to do.

When the first sergeant falls pregnant, toasts are made, elation howled up at the stars. After all, it’s a minor miracle that anyone can produce a child after so much radiation exposure. But it doesn’t feel like hope to you. It feels like a malignant root, a tie to this land you never wanted. The mother cradles her growing belly and cries when she thinks no one can hear her.

You try to teach your children about the land you came from. You sing them old songs in your native tongue. You tell them of landscapes buried under snow, so much purer than sand, of cold so deep it freezes your breath and blackens exposed flesh, of driving winters so ferocious they held back entire armies. You teach them about a great empire that rose and fell under the northern sky, a government that grew corrupt but could not destroy its people’s spirits, wars and revolutions but also peace, because there is so much war in this place already. You remember, and you wait to go home.

But little by little, they start to forget. The memory of the empire rusts and crumbles like the spiked shells of your cars. Your children’s children cannot imagine how it feels to drink hot soup the color of blood as the world outside your window drowns in icy white. They cannot see the colored arches of your cathedrals when they close their eyes. When someone says “winter”, they see only sand.

Soon, no one is waiting to go home.


End file.
